pineapple
by fairy-prose
Summary: "Tinned pineapple? You fantasized about preserved fruit?"


He blurts it out in the middle of a Tesco, while holding a tin of cubed pineapple.

"This was a fantasy of mine, you know."

Rose looks up at him questioningly, brown eyes searching his with affectionate confusion. "Tinned pineapple? You fantasized about preserved fruit?" She taps a finger against her mouth – her lovely mouth, pink and soft and probably still tasting of the tea she'd had this morning. He wants to kiss her, wants to see if he can tell how many sugars she took in it by how sweet her lips are. "Actually, knowing you, that's really not that surprising."

"What? No!" The Doctor manages to tear his eyes away from Rose's mouth long enough to shake his head, contradicting her. "Not the pineapple. Just – this. Us. With the grocery shopping and the grey hairs and the tinned fruit and the – _you._"

He is getting better at this – the saying what he means. Or, at the very least, he's _trying_ to get better at it. It seems, though, that no amount of happiness or human DNA can do much to counteract the way this body tends to ramble, the way he always ends up dancing away from what he means to say, even when he really is _trying_ to say it. It's beyond frustrating, sometimes, and every once in a while he'll find himself longing for the patterns of a previous life – for the no-nonsense directness of his last body, or for the one before that's tendency towards poetry and romance.

"I just mean–"

For every two dozen times that this tongue runs away with him, there's half a dozen that it fails him altogether. Sometimes the words just _stick_ in his throat, choked by a swirling chemical cocktail of emotion and sensation that he still isn't used to, even after two years in Pete's World – two years of waking up with Rose's tangled blonde hair and warm skin next to him in bed, two years of messy kisses and brilliant shags punctuated with laughter, two years of accumulating laugh lines and scars on this new human(ish) body of his.

He wants to share every silly, domestic fantasy he's ever had with her. Wants to tell her how every now and then he used to just – _pretend_. When they'd gone to the shops to pick up milk, when he'd take her hand while they browsed through some market. When he took her to dinner at the treetop restaurant on Florazel III, when they'd spent an afternoon eating and drinking and laughing at a street party in 1950s London. When they'd sit in the kitchen on the TARDIS in the middle of the night, smiling at each other over mugs of tea and talking about nothing.

When they'd entertained, for that one night on the Sanctuary base, the possibility of being _stuck._

Those are the times he'd wished he wasn't the last of the Time Lords for reasons that had nothing to do with the war. Those are the times when he imagined they might be any two ordinary people, with _forevers_ that could match up.

(And there might still be a part of him that panics, every morning, when he searches for the beat of a second heart that isn't there – but the bigger part of him is too busy pinching himself, to make sure he isn't dreaming.)

He doesn't want to tell her about how he used to look up at the Chameleon Arch, hanging there in the rafters of the console room. He still cringes to think about how he used to let himself look up and wonder, for a few seconds, before shaking himself and saying _no._ That's a sort of fantasy, too, though, even if he isn't particularly proud of it – so maybe he should. Tell her, that is.

He _does_ want to tell her that he's been imagining these sorts of things ever since she bought him chips, ever since that first cheap date.

The Doctor puts the tin of pineapple back on the shelf.

"Over nine hundred years, and I never envied humans. Loved you to bits, yeah, but I never wanted to _be_ one – what with the aches and pains, the tiny lifespans, the staggeringly limited senses. And that's before you ever get to the _EastEnders_ and the beans on toast." He looks back at Rose, meets her eyes and sees hurt starting to shine there. Quickly, wanting to banish the emotion, he brings his hand to her cheek and gently sweeps a thumb across the soft skin. She leans into his touch instinctively, and the reflexive nature of that movement makes his single heart swell with those emotions he can't quite quantify – _happiness, comfort, familiarity, love_, all of them and none of them at once.

He draws in a deep breath and chooses his next words carefully, precisely, willing her to hear what he's really trying to say.

"Then I met _you._"


End file.
